Imaginary Action
by the midnight rhapsody
Summary: After "The Future Job," Eliot and Parker think about murder. Or sex. Sometimes they're basically the same thing. A system develops, one that will persist far into the future, but nobody's going to complain. Much. Parker/Eliot, Parker/Hardison, pre-E/P/H.
1. Eliot

This little thing was inspired by "The Future Job" in season 2, obviously. I was surprised that Eliot, who is haunted by his past, would be so willing to kill Rand. This is my shippy take on the conversation they might have had post-episode.

**Update 8/19:** Apparently, this fic wasn't over until I wrote two more parts. But now that chapters two and three are up, it's definitely finished.

I don't own Leverage.

* * *

**Eliot**

He finds her - well, he doesn't find her, he simply comes upon her - curled up in the cupboard, which seems odd until he remembers that this is _Parker. _She spends her free time crawling through air ducts. It figures that she would feel most at home in a small, dark space.

He imagines her in a crate under the ground and asks, "What are you _doing?"_

"I'm imagining," she says. She doesn't look at him. "I'm imagining that we did the job the way I wanted. I like the way the tendons in his neck severed."

And he's imagining it too, suddenly. There's a bright castoff pattern on his shirt and his foot squelches in a nice red puddle, and Parker's there, smiling, the kind of smile she reserves for violence and chocolate, she's holding a sword and they're sharing a look-

-snaps out of it, appraises her. How is it that _she_ can speak of this so frankly, so dispassionately? "He really was a bad guy, wasn't he?"

It's so inadequate. He'd like to ask if she's okay. He'd like to ask what she sees in her head. But there are no words. He can be eloquent, except when it comes to important things. There are no words at all. But Parker just shakes her head and replies, "We're bad guys. We're good guys, but we're bad guys, too. Rand wasn't bad. He was worse."

He's not a good guy. He's about to tell her this when she adds, "Would you really have done it?"

"Oh, there's no question," he replies. And there isn't. He doesn't make offers he can't make good on, and maybe he usually has a no-kill policy, but this is different. This is Parker. Rand hurt Parker in a way that truly is unforgivable, and for her, he'd do anything. Even that. "Did you really want me to?"

Somehow he's slid down. He's sitting with his left shoulder against the row of cabinets, facing Parker, who's still in the cupboard. She reaches out, surprising him - she's not the most tactile of people - and touches her fingertips to his, a quiet little nudge that inexplicably makes him feel fifteen years younger. Just for a moment. "Yes. No. I don't know. I wanted him dead - want him dead - but I don't know if I wanted _you _to do it. You don't kill people anymore."

There are lots of things he doesn't do anymore. He thinks it might be nice to be like her, breaking down all of life into the simplest little bits and putting them back together in readable patterns, but he lives in a perpetual state of grey. He can't separate the details from the larger picture. Where Parker sees cause and effect, a logical sequence with a beginning, an end, and a goal, he sees a badly-wound ball of twine. He doesn't know what to say, so he covers her fingers with his own and watches her work out her own query.

She sighs. "No. _I _want to do it. Is that bad?"

_Want. _Not _wanted, _but _want. _He can relate. It's easy to not kill people; it's hard to stop fantasizing. You don't become a hitter because you want world peace. "Nah, it's not bad. I'd have been right there with you, if you'd have gone and ripped his head off."

"But Nate wouldn't have liked it."

"No, he wouldn't have."

"Neither would Hardison."

"No." And that's true, despite Hardison's assertion that Rand ought to be shot. The fact is that Hardison sees the world in code, all of it, so even inanimate objects have feelings. Everything is useful, everything is significant. Even in his 'bad guy' days, Hardison saw the value in preserving human life. "No, he wouldn't have either."

Parker finally looks at him then, looks into his eyes and through him. He can't look away. She's naked, and so is he, and he wrenches himself back into reality in time to hear her say, "Hardison likes me a lot. I think probably more than I like him. But I don't want to let him down like that; he thinks I'm better than I am, and sometimes that's the person I want to be."

"You can be anything you want to be, Parker. That's the best part of being like us."

"Because we can be the good guys and still do bad things. I can still do the things I'm good at, and so can you, and people thank us for it because we help them. Helping people is the right thing to do. I know it is. But I still want him dead, Eliot. That's why I'm sitting here imagining. It's the only way I'll get what I want. Do you ever imagine?"

"Oh, I imagine a lot of things," he replies, and he has to look away. He imagines plenty. Sometimes he even imagines Parker, but it's probably not a good idea to tell her-

"Now I'm imagining you," she tells him, leaning forward, catching his gaze again. His stomach goes somewhere else, either too high or too low or maybe just twisting itself into knots. Her matter-of-fact statement is sexier than it has any right to be, and he can't tell whether or not that is by design. "I'm imagining being on top of you, right here in the kitchen. You're leaning back, and I'm in your lap, and..."

Well, hell. It's not so much an invitation as it is a warning; he knows when their lips meet that she wasn't planning to keep that sort of fantasy in her head, and he's not going to say no. Parker is indelicate and inexperienced, forceful. She squeezes his biceps hard enough that he'll have bruises later, and he'll want to keep them - nail marks and all - because they came from her, from this. She truly is remarkable. Even as he reciprocates, he can feel her changing, analyzing, refining her technique; he half-expects her to pull away and rattle off critique, but she doesn't. She _moves, _and he has to break it off himself before they get into something that really doesn't belong on the kitchen floor.

"Parker." She leans in for another kiss and he's _this close _to throwing caution to the wind, so he pushes her away very lightly and repeats, "Parker."

"What?"

"This isn't the time or the place."

She frowns. "It's never the time or place. I once heard that these things just happen. They're natural. We make them, don't we? We make them happen. I want it. Don't you?"

"Yes." With anyone but Parker, the vehemence might be embarrassing, but she doesn't look for or care about tone. "Just...not here on the kitchen floor."

"I can imagine kissing you anywhere. In here, on a bed, in an elevator shaft...hanging off of a building in harnesses..."

And she's off in another fantasy. He can almost see it too, the way she seems to be able to see it. It's almost as clear as the times he tore the limbs off of his big dirty secret, Damien Moreau, the times he ripped out the hearts of everyone who ever hurt Parker. Almost as clear as cutting off Rand's head with her. And they're running together, the scenarios are bleeding into each other, and suddenly he and Parker are kissing over Rand's dismembered body, and her bloody hands are working up underneath his shirt, and-

-he really should stop this before it goes any further, but he hears himself say, "Let's move this to..."

To where, exactly? It's not as though they live here, and Nate would not be pleased if they continued this in his bedroom.

"I have a secret place near here, but by the time we get there it won't be the same, will it?"

"No," he says reluctantly.

She places one more kiss on his lips, softly, and says, "Thank you, Eliot."

"What for?"

"For being bad guys with me." She stands, runs her fingers through her hair, and adds, "Nobody really gets it. Nobody but you."

He doesn't know if they'll ever continue this. It can't come to anything, not really, but that's okay; relationships are a pain in the ass. He's not looking for that with her. It's not about sex, but about the only kind of intimacy he can offer. The only kind of intimacy Parker would be able to understand. He imagines that she's not the kind of woman who'd appreciate a gentle touch, and it brings a small smile to his face. "Yeah. I get it."

And he does. And all she needs to do is say the word. For her, he would do anything.


	2. Parker

So this - the part two I never intended to write - is what lots of people would consider dark as hell. I personally dislike what seems to be accepted fanon: Parker as an innocent sweetheart who needs to be protected and couldn't hurt anybody. I mean, are we watching the same show? She shows this gleeful sadism that would probably terrify her teammates were she not so goddamn cute, and she's clearly physically capable. Parker's got a past. A relationship with Hardison would be sweet, because he makes her want to be a better person, but with Eliot, she doesn't have to be anything other than what she is, even when it's - as I stated previously - "dark" as hell. (Other note: Eliot's behavior and words always made me think he 'took the punishment' not just because he could, but because he wanted to. A sort of penance for all the things he used to do. So, I wouldn't classify him as a masochist, but fair warning anyway.)

* * *

**Parker**

Parker was ten when she first killed a man. He'd been the male half of a pair of foster parents, a ragged, pathetic thing just looking to collect the money. When he tried to make her _do _things, _touch _him, she just stabbed and stabbed until all she could see was red. Then she left the house, left the system entirely, and began her illustrious career as a professional thief.

But she doesn't talk about it now. Her team doesn't know. First it was because she didn't trust them, and now it's because they like her. She doesn't feel bad about it, about any of her kills, because she never killed anyone who didn't deserve to die, and only if there was no other option; she's not a monster, and besides, the benefits always outweighed the downsides. Simple logic dictated that killing was the best option. But most of the team wouldn't understand.

When Nate says they're the good guys, when Sophie calls her 'sweetie,' she doesn't point out that she'll never be sweet and she'll never be a good guy at heart. She just moves forward, as everything must, and considers herself one of the good guys because other people benefit from her actions.

Things are different now, though, after her conversation with Eliot on the kitchen floor. She wants him to see. She wants him.

Eliot is all the things she is, and she's fairly certain he's got the same thoughts in his head, and there really was something satisfying about kissing it out of him. Sometimes when they exercise together, she thinks about shoving him into the rack of weights, holding him there with her lips and hands. She knows the exact amount of force required to make this happen. When they're fighting each other, training against each other, she thinks about getting him down on the ground, unable to move, punching him or kissing him, or maybe both, though the logistics of that one would be...

It doesn't matter. She doesn't do those things because they haven't agreed to them, and Parker may be a thief, but she doesn't want to steal that from Eliot. Before now, she didn't know how to bring it up, so she stayed silent.

Besides. Sometimes brute strength and adrenaline hinder the otherwise flawless application of physics; he could just as easily overpower her, and that might be fun too, but it wouldn't be the same. Now, she thinks it's worth pursuing.

It's three in the morning. She's timed it perfectly, so she finds him lying on a bed at his extra place. Predictably, it's neat, spartan, easy to leave behind. People like them don't stay in one place for too long, generally by choice but also by necessity, and it's telling that they both have chosen to settle down with this crew. Everything just works, even with Sophie gone. But old habits die hard.

"What are you doing here," he asks, completely unsurprised at her appearance. He probably smelled her coming or something, a neat trick he'd probably never teach her. It might not even be teachable, and really, that's not what she should be thinking about right now.

"I'm here for you," she replies. "You need to know that I can take care of myself. I always have."

Parker wishes that she could articulate her thoughts better. She struggles with the spoken word on occasion, especially when she's never talked about the subject before. She used to practice in front of the mirror every time she learned about a new topic; now, she just doesn't bother. The math is on her side: less interaction equals less bullshit, and now the only people who regularly interact with her are smart enough to understand what she's trying to say.

"Yeah, I know that, Parker. You've been a thief for two-thirds of your life."

"It's not just thieving, Eliot. I might not have been good at face-to-face fighting before you started training me, but I never let anybody hurt me."

"...I see," he says, and she thinks he actually does.

"I want to have sex with you now," she informs him, inviting herself onto his bed. It's narrow, but it'll fit the both of them, if they don't end up somewhere else. "I've never tried it before, but I've done it enough in my imagination that I know what I want from you, and you can just tell me what you want from me if I do it wrong."

"You imagine that?" She wishes she could read his tone, but she's never been very good at that sort of thing. Tone can't be broken down into numbers, can't be properly categorized and filed away. With Eliot, it hardly matters anyway. "You imagine sex with me?"

"Sometimes. Sometimes it's not sex. Sometimes I imagine that I'm cutting you. Sometimes I imagine watching you struggle for air, and-"

He's kissing her before she can even process that he's moved, lips moving against hers with no pattern, which is slightly annoying, but she's kissed him before. She knows that moving her mouth a certain way will _do things _to him, and hopefully, she'll get the chance to find out how the rest of his body works. She'll even make an effort to ignore any weak spots or potential targets, but she suspects she won't find any without scouring his body in detail. That might come later, but not tonight.

"How often," he asks - growls, really, and it's kind of interesting how his voice is affecting her - into her mouth. "How often do you kill me, Parker?"

"Less often than we do this," she gasps, not because of what he's doing with his hips, but because he's just jerked on her hair hard enough to rip out a few strands, and somehow that little burst of pain has made the whole thing better. She repays him with a bite and suck to his collarbone hard enough to coax tiny little droplets of blood to the surface, licks them away, and the noise he makes settles deep in her chest. It's the same kind of noise he sometimes makes when they're sparring, though even _she _understands that the context is different; sometimes three pineapples are three fruits, and sometimes they're three grenades.

It's the kind of noise she imagines when she thinks about him hurting people, not for Leverage, but for personal reasons. It's the kind of noise she made when she was fourteen and Anna Voorhees tried to kill her for her cut of their haul. Well, the noise she made after their little spat, and Anna was broken on the floor of the warehouse.

When she gets the chance, between hard kisses, she asks, "So are we going to have sex?"

"Yeah," he replies, breathy, and she wonders if - hopes - he will let it all out. She doesn't want something gentle or pretty or nice or anything else like that. She wants him, all of him, because that's the only way she can let _herself_ out.

It's dark, which is the way she likes it. She's a thief, but she hasn't stolen anything from Eliot, and doesn't plan to steal anything from him in the future. It's almost embarrassing to do things the normal way, to ask for what she wants, but this is the kind of thing you can't steal. Even in her imagination, she's never stolen this, and she never, ever will.

She applies pressure to a wound he sustained on their latest job. Smiles when he makes another sound and flips her onto her back, pushing down on her right arm _just enough _to make her cry out. Maybe this is weird, she doesn't know, but the physicality, the pain...

If she didn't know better, she'd think this was what it meant to feel _alive._


	3. Hardison

Okay, here's the third part, which deals with Parker's actual relationship with Hardison. I'm setting this somewhere before season five but after season four. So it's been a while since the first two chapters. It's still Parker/Eliot, but also Parker/Hardison and even a bit of pre-Hardison/Eliot, because truthfully the three of them have been my preferred ship from the beginning. So, uh, ship ahoy.

* * *

**Hardison**

"Where you going, babe?"

Parker shrugs, turns to him, grins a little. He loves that little smile - not the sharp one, not the manic one he knows is reserved for something a little more violent than he prefers, but the one that means whatever passes for affection for her - and it warms him, a little, to see it.

"I'm going to see Eliot. We haven't had sex in a while." She turns away again and she's about to slip out the door, but _no, _not until they've discussed this, because _what._

"You're going to...what, make love to someone who's not your boyfriend?"

"Don't be silly," she says, seemingly giving up leaving for the time being. "Eliot and I don't make love. We have sex. I didn't even know there was such a thing as making love until Sophie told me about it three months ago. I thought love was already there."

He doesn't get it, even after running it through the Parker-to-English translator he installed in his brain a couple of years ago. He can hack into basically anything, even things traditionally considered un-hackable. He can code in English et en français und auf Deutsch. He wrote his own OS when he was fourteen. But he can't get inside Parker's head. "But we-"

She shakes her head, cutting him off. "I think I know what you're going to say. I can't have sex with you like I have with Eliot, Alec. You're...special. I don't want you to get hurt."

Pushing down his joy at being called Alec, Hardison considers this. It's not unfeasible for Parker to break down her relationships into functions and solve people-equations using the given values of cause, effect, usefulness, and relation to herself, but what he can't understand is why she thinks having sex with him would hurt him _worse _than knowing she's having sex with somebody else. Even if that somebody else is Eliot, who - and Hardison is always honest with himself, even if it's not pleasant - is the only one he'd trust with his girl anyway. "Sex doesn't get people hurt, Mama, it feels good. That's the point."

Sometimes Parker's wide-eyed gaze makes him feel like she's a star, burning, pulling him in. He's got no idea how fast he'd have to go to reach escape velocity and he wouldn't want to anyway, but he's trapped in her. He knows she's running an analysis, compiling her data, translating it into something usable, but that's okay. He has nothing to hide anyway, not from her. Finally, she replies, "This kind of sex does. We do it on purpose. We haven't done it since you and I...but it helps. You make me a better person, but the old Parker's still there, and sometimes she just needs to come out."

He can't even feel any surprise, though he knows he probably should. Parker's always had a sadistic streak, found joy in torture and physical violence. He just assumed, perhaps naïvely, that it didn't carry over to the bedroom. Obviously, this isn't the case, and maybe it makes sense, this thing she has with Eliot. It would explain their cohesiveness, at any rate, and the way Eliot looks at her sometimes, and _how did he not see this before?_

"I don't know what to say," he tells her, and she comes to sit next to him on the couch. Touches his arm. She's not one for physical contact, unless she's being playful or poking at someone's injuries (or both), so it's reassuring, even though it shouldn't be. He should be mad as hell, but he isn't. "You know you could've come to me with this. Talked to me. I could even-"

"No, you couldn't." He doesn't ask when she got so good at predicting what people will say. "Last time we had to stitch him up. And then we kissed again."

"I can't know this," he says.

"It's the truth," she counters. "You're my boyfriend. Sophie says couples don't keep secrets."

"You're gonna go no matter what, aren't you? Even if I ask you not to."

"I don't want you to get hurt," she says again. "I won't go if it hurts you, even though I'll get hurt."

Well, hell. How can he be upset by this? Parker is Parker, and he wouldn't love her if she were anyone else. And if this...thing...with Eliot makes her happy, gives her the tools to live the kind of life she wants to live, he doesn't want to get involved. He finds that he's not even jealous, not really. Eliot is an attractive man, has that sort of sexy angry thing going on, and it's clear that he'd do anything for her. Whatever he has with Parker, it's not any sort of romance; Parker's dating Hardison, and Eliot picks up girls all the time, and maybe it's just a space where they can hurt someone without repercussions, get hurt by someone they trust.

Hardison's not stupid. He knows how being in pain makes a person feel vulnerable, and for someone like Parker, that's a bad thing. But everyone needs moments of vulnerability, or they'd bubble until they shattered.

"I don't want you to get hurt either," he finds himself saying. "If that means getting your pain on with Eliot sometimes, then..."

"Maybe you could come along sometime," she says cheerily, and kisses him firmly on the mouth. "I'll ask Eliot if he'd mind if you watched."

He doesn't know how to feel about that at all. Seriously, is it normal to be both turned on and terrified by that idea? He watches Parker slide out the door, knowing she'll probably jump out a window because she's Parker, and smiles a little. Maybe she has a thing with Eliot, and maybe that's a part of her Hardison will never be able to share, but at the end of the day, she kisses him and appreciates him and has feelings for him.

And Eliot, well, he's okay. If it had to be anyone, at least it's him.


End file.
